How to mass delete Android Messages and start over clean?

fuzzywuzzywazzafuzzy

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Bought a Galaxy S24 and restored texts from a backup, and every single archived message gets restored to new phone, but not in Archived folder. They all restore to my main Messages inbox, meaning I now have 5000+ messages in view, when they should almost all be in archived section. How do I either mass delete all of these messages without clicking one by one by one, or, is there a way to restore selective messages from the backup and do that transfer again via smart switch?
 

mustang7757

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What a pain to have archived messages mixed with regular messages and 5k of them

This is Google's message app?

Smart switch you meaning by cable between devices?
 

Village_Idiot

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Technically, they are all residing on the server. I don't think there is an easy way to mass delete them. If you long press a message, it puts you into multi-select mode. From there you can select multiple messages. But you have to select each message individually; there doesn't seem to be a way to select all, then deselect the messages you don't want to delete. The web portal doesn't allow mass deletion either.
 

fuzzywuzzywazzafuzzy

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I guess instead of archiving messages I'll have to start deleting them. I'm discovering that not only are all archived messages restoring to the inbox, but so are all the spam messages. Ugh. I wish it would restore to the correct folder!
 

Del1701

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Bought a Galaxy S24 and restored texts from a backup, and every single archived message gets restored to new phone, but not in Archived folder. They all restore to my main Messages inbox, meaning I now have 5000+ messages in view, when they should almost all be in archived section. How do I either mass delete all of these messages without clicking one by one by one, or, is there a way to restore selective messages from the backup and do that transfer again via smart switch?
Could you try using the Samsung messages app instead of Google messages, I think you can mass delete with that app and then go back to using Google messages once you have finished? I always used samsung messages before now but since getting the 24 ultra I have been using Google messages, but I still have samsung messages installed just in case.
 

fuzzywuzzywazzafuzzy

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Could you try using the Samsung messages app instead of Google messages, I think you can mass delete with that app and then go back to using Google messages once you have finished? I always used samsung messages before now but since getting the 24 ultra I have been using Google messages, but I still have samsung messages installed just in case.
Not sure if that would work, but I took the time to delete all the old messages I didn't want. Took me an hour!
 
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